Why Should I Care as a Teacher and as a Student?

For many years, countless industrial complaints have been heard that the graduated software engineering students are not directly employable and fit to be hired for their work. Fresh graduates lack fundamental knowledge and skills and they do not have the capacity and personal attributes that make them directly function in a job. The complaints mainly concern lack of exposure to industrial methods and practices that are being followed on a daily basis such as, for instance, arduous process of identifying precise requirements and assuring that all the essential activities have been accomplished.

The main mission of universities is to provide a well-balanced high quality education by combining the excellence of software engineering research with practice. Unfortunately, this is a very difficult task to accomplish. Today, software engineering courses have to compete with many other vanilla courses such as mathematics, computer science, business, artificial intelligence, operating systems, and the like. The landscape of software engineering is vast and is continuously expanding with new methods and technologies. To produce a well-educated and fully-fledged mature software engineer is not only a matter of providing adequate education and finding appropriate educational material but also a matter of having knowledgeable and experienced faculty who are capable of transfering deep understanding of the software engineering intricacies and capable of exposing students to various difficulties and hardships.

To make fresh graduates a profitable workforce and asset, the industry puts substantial resources into schooling them almost from the very basic level. For this reason, the software industry requires that universities ensure an explicit connection between academic software engineering courses and industrial employability. This seems like mission next to impossible to achieve today. Therefore, you as a teacher and student should definitely care for assuring that ESSENCE gets introduced into software engineering educational curricula.

As a teacher, you encounter many problems and difficulties that you cannot remedy on your own. The short time windows assigned to the topic of software engineering makes you squeeze the whole topic into one or two undergraduate courses within the educational programme. On top of that there is no course literature that might help you deliver the full coverage of software engineering in an amenable to students manner. The industrial complaints that you do not deliver as you should do not help you in creating optimal courses. Software engineering includes many essential and highly intertwined topics, and it is difficult to prioritize among them, and still, provide a holistic view of software engineering.

Being minimalistic in its design and intuitive in its understanding, ESSENCE is an excellent tool for covering the wholeness of the basics of software engineering methods and the interdependencies of their parts. ESSENCE gives you a great big relief that you have at least delivered the most essential parts of software engineering, parts that are highly relevant for the industry and research. ESSENCE is a kind of assurance that you are delivering quality software engineering education.

As a graduate student, you have invested time and money for your education. Therefore, it is important for you to feel secure that you are highly useful and employable from the very start of your professional career. Essence is your insurance that you have not left university empty handed with respect to your understanding of the scope and complexity of software engineering. Even in its minimalistic design, ESSENCE has already provided you with the full spectrum of the basics of the software engineering methods and has shown how it may assist you in your professional work. You now know where to turn to for proper guidance in your future projects. Therefore, you may easily come on board in any project. Your understanding of software engineering is inline with the industial standards of acceptance.